With a Little Help from My Friends: How do Management Consultants Contribute to Innovation Processes?

In step with an increasingly knowledge-based competition firms increases their innovation activities. For this purpose integration, of external inputs from management consultants increasingly comes fore. However, the value of management consultants in general and to innovation processes in particular has been challenged. From some perspectives, management consultants are being criticized as dressing up mundane truths in fancy concepts and doing nothing but telling customers what they already know. The purpose of this paper is to try to understand the value of management consultancy from a sensemaking perspective, using a case study of concept development processes in a leading European Kitchen manufacturer. As will be showed, redressing what customers already know may in fact comprise a valuable input for their clients’ ability to identify a conception of reality which entails an actionable conception of reality.